This post is taking part in the Farcaster 2026 writing contest.
Lets face it, it's always been about that.
Enshittification is the risk we always take after we start a new digital venture, less and less feedback from users, more and more internal process refinements for the sake of survival, or maybe, why not, more and more greed, given the fact that we are on the blockchain after all...
How many times true decentralization believers have been facing the greed issue while speaking with people that do not even know what decentralization is but could crack a metamask wallet in a couple of hours.
That's the reality of the blockchain now, enshittified.
That is what Farcaster has intentionally been fighting since the beginning, conceiving new monetization methods, allowing micro creators to get rewards for content experiments, incentivizing valuable social connections and snowball effects, fighting bots and tip farming, allowing the whole memecoin ecosystem to thrive on the base network like it would never have done without it.
We all enjoyed it, the base memecoin ecosystem is so full of content and meaning that the whole solana pump.fun thing pales in comparison, we all know that we'll last longer.
On solana memecoin success is too random and a sense of inequality reigns between people, but warpcast built an ecosystem in which people help each other spreading meaningful content, we are aware of how much of the whole balance depends on our responsibility and commitment to the community.
That is the real reason for the farcaster role in unshittifying the decentralized internet, not just my opinion on how the next year will look like.
A void to fill
We still have a step to take on the internet content ecosystem and this one is hard, a lot harder that helping each other.
We will soon face the problem that agents can farm our tips a lot better than the usual bots and the content monetization mechanic will keep being challenged, fake snowball effects are few seconds away in the AI evolution, the only thing we can do is to be part of the ai revolution with more agency, literally.
The only weak point of AI is resource consumption, and i think this is the void that we should fill to act on this new tech landscape, in a decentralized way, like DePIN projects have been doing for years on the blockchain, with a warning that this is not a field in which big winners get in relief fast.
I have been digging into DePIN on Base for almost one month and I was able to find only two projects, the golem network is a classical example, with computing power being exchanged for the native token, very much like the render network on Ethereum, a decentralized infra that aims to run ethical ai, without the risk of any government shutting it down if they do not comply with their standards.
How easy would it be to evolve the "storage" of our farcaster accounts into a computational space, or simply allowing anyone to share network or computational power to pay for it, ensuring sustainability for the average users and rewards for the user that decides to "feed" an AI model in the direction of her skills based on the channel she's a member of, in the end that is a categorization that we already have, categories are important for AI data feeds.
According to Coingeko DePIN tokens have a market of more than 18 billion dollars, 5 millions are on base 5 billions on solana, but L2s on the whole OP stack do not seem to have taken this field seriously, and they are so wrong.
Let me tell you why while telling you the story of the most interesting DePIN project on the base network, because it's a good story, that speaks about content while leveraging those values that sometimes we feel have been lost in our decentralized communities: it's the story of PKT.cash a decentralized media network on Base co-founded by the producer of the blockbuster Oblivion.
It all started in 2019, when the values of the blockchain were very clear to all contributors, and when the proof of work algorithm on which the PKT network runs was perfected along with its yellowpaper.
At the start the network, aimed to be a decentralized version of Roku or Apple TV with its first streaming platform, BIA, a hub for TV and films.
Then in August 2024 they migrated on base.
The move has several reasons, including the introduction of a stake-to-earn protocol that allows users to earn daily and long-term staking rewards and yields.
"We always been focused on making this very user-friendly and adoptable and we wanted to be kind of a big fish in a small pond over at Base, and I really believe in Coinbase's mission in what they're trying to accomplish as a platform and lowering the barrier to entry to participate" Jesse Berger said.
Another advantage of using Base, the team said in a release, is the technology upgrade that introduces smart contracts and Web3 features.
But all the protocol needs to be rebuilt, and here farcaster development could come in handy.
The Minr app was once used to streamline and enhance the PKT PoW mining process is not usable anymore, stepping in to fill this void, using the PKT token or building our own correlated token would be a huge step, allowing all farcaster users to step naturally into DePIN while boosting lending and borrowing to grow their historical ecosystem and the farcaster community in the direction of high quality content creation spreading more articulated narratives, which is particularly needed now, aligning that with the whole "snowball effect" thingy.
We create the condition for better content to be created, without barganing on single casts with farmers.
Minr app was designed with the goal of making mining accessible to a wider audience for a broader token distribution. It provided a user-friendly mining interface that enabled miners to control their PKT pool configuration, change CPU allocation, and choose which wallet address to mine into. As of August 2024, with PKT's move to Base and new focus on Stake-to-Earn, PKT mining is no longer applicable to the project and it's been replaced by staking, farcaster could offer a similar service for staking.
Each PKT node needs at least 5000$ staked to be active on the network, and gets weekly checks risking slashing if it doesn'y comply for more than 3 checks.
Incentive mechanics are put in place to incentivize reliability, in particular for geographical areas with scarce contributions, we could definitely use that to reward remote farcaster users.
Is this unshittinfying?
Now that we have a censorship resistant platform we'll be able to expand unrepresented narratives without restrictions using our well tested micro influencing mechanic, allowing big creators to articulate epic stories using lots of computational resources, the same resources that can bebused to train and run ai agents.
The average users can provide those resources from remote places where the decentralized internet could really make a difference.
In this way farcaster may be able to prevent its inevitable enshittification, countering the increasing limits on tipping.
We will maintain a suitable revenue for the average user that shares computational and network power on a node that spreads decentralized stories, big and small, or simply stakes token on its pool.
Becoming an ally to high level content creators that understand and worked on decentralization for a long time farcaster ensures its content may align and be used toward the growth of the social values that it represents in our minds.
With an evolved impactful narrative we can avoid decentralization being cornered on primitive scattered tipping stories without the traction it deserves to lead that part of the world that is screaming for appropriate representation.
